Edition 43, June 9th - 2009

Saturday rain was good for a duck, but not good for a Swan
And Pocono Recap

June 6 th was the initial outing of the #97 limited late entry piloted by James Swan at Dells Raceway Park, but like many other planned races this year, the threat of rain all day cancelled all activities at the track. We plan on returning on June 13 th and July 4 th and other plus possible dates this season. The team is anxious to see how the Chevy will perform on the 1/3 mile located in Wisconsin’s tourist playground.

So with another of my planned race trips cancelled, I decided to focus my attention on the weekend’s televised racing. Seemed unusual to have the three racing venues in three different states, which explains why the Sprint driver count was down so much for the Nationwide race at Nashville. The event had a lot of good hard racing, but I will not hide my annoyance with the person who won the race and how Mr. Kyle Bush treated the winner’s trophy by destroying it in victory lane. I suppose he had a good reason for being immature.

But my main focus was on the Sunday Pocono race. I have always enjoyed watching this race due to the unique track design that is hard on man and machine. Alan Kulwicki won this race in 1992 by bringing a car with an overdrive transmission. He was able to pull a lot less rpm’s in the long straights and yet downshift to gain the torque for the corners. After Alan’s experiment worked so well all teams showed up at Pocono with the jerico transmission, which was later banned from use.

So I settled in to watch the start with the new double restart format and the field was by points due to the rained out qualifying session (again). The race had barely started when the first caution was thrown for the #11 entry on track with no power. The Gibbs team would repeat this scenario identically on lap 13 and had to pit again under caution. The #17 killer bees got Matt out in second due to two tire change and positioned behind the #48. Lap 25 Johnson continued to lead followed by the tough running Rousch fleet of Biffle, Kenseth, and Edwards. Lap 50 scoring had #99 leading followed by #16. Of note, the #14 Stewart had moved up from the 43 to 10 th position at this point.

Lap 80 leaders were Edwards, Biffle, Johnson and Kenseth in that order. The one big miscue for the Aflac sponsored Ford occurred on lap 101 when the team did not get the second fuel can into the car, and on lap 104 the caution came out and caught Johnson entering the pits before they were open. He had to restart at the rear of the field. Lap 144 and the #99 worked his way to the lead again with his teammates in tow. With 43 laps to the checkered flag the #14 Office Depot entry had taken the lead with the normal train of Hendrick and Rousch cars following.

With 33 laps to go, the #9 Budweiser, #33 Cheerios, and 83 Red Bull cars had moved into the top seven and with 25 to go the #39 Haas and #00 Aarons sponsored entries were running in the top nine. And then the drama started to unfurl as teams were concerned about running out of fuel and this track is certainly not were you can not afford to run out of gas or you most certainly will go one or more laps down to the leaders. This was going to be a strange conclusion to a long race day.

True to form several teams dove in with a handful of laps left for fuel and those that took a chance and stayed out were lucky this day; except of course Johnson who ran out of fuel on the last lap. So with that said, the finishers in order of the June Pocono race are, 14, 99,00, 24, 39, 47 and 42. Wow, I did not see that coming, but I am happy for Tony Stewart and can only imagine that Ambrose and Montoya are still trying to figure out how they were so fortunate were they finished. The Sprint drivers move on to the Michigan two-miler next weekend.

And the #97 Big Eight entry returns to Dells on the 13 th, Madison on the 19 th, Madison nationals on the 30 th, and Dells Raceway Park on July 4 th. If you get a chance come out and see us at your favorite event. We are anxious to get this race program up front where it belongs.

RACING TO THE CHECKERS

Jim